Testimonials

Arguments, Debate and Criticism At JCNPS#1! The Wonderful World of Physics!

August 9, 2015

One of the most beautiful statements in physics is to humbly admit when you do not know something, or have found empirical evidence that does not match the expected. This is the fuel that hopefully fires an increase in active participation within the JCNPS. As a former mainstream researcher, I took it upon faith that someone much smarter than I had already answered the big questions. My understanding was that Lord Kelvin would at least be eventually proved correct in "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement."...

...wait...we didn't know the cause of mass? (Higgs Boson) ...wait...you are defining a new type of energy (Dark Energy)? ...wait...every type of matter and energy we know of in the universe only accounts for less than 4%?

and my own personal coup de grâce: ...wait...there is a constant of integration within our best theory of relativity?..AND after 100 years the best minds in physics have come no where close in giving it physical meaning? (10^-120 is NOT close).

I call Bull Shit.

I am bailing on the mainstream. I demand the right to shoot the sacred cows and examine how we came to these models. There have been many brilliant people in physics, including the giants, but all humans at one point or another are capable of fooling themselves.

Thank you JCNPS for the lively debate at the first conference and am looking forward to the wonderful ideas being put forth and food for thought! I intend to write an update to a blog here every week or two.

If you are a mainstream researcher, and your critical thinking skills give you the uneasy feeling you are helping design better epicycle charts, let us know if you want to post your concerns anonymously.

When I was a child I loved to read the Time-Life series of books about science. I practically memorized the dinosaur volume, but i was intimately familiar with then all. As a teen I began my career in electronics and wound up as a Metrologist in the United Stated Marine Corps. Between experimenting with vacuum tube and transistor circuits in radios and television, or making precision four wire resistance measurements, it became clear to me what science was really about: experimentation, observation, measurement, and analysis. It did not matter if you were troubleshooting, designing, or analyzing, the methodology is the same.

One day I listened to a debate between Carl Sagan (who was one of my heroes at the time) and a creationist whose name I cannot recall. It was an interesting exchange until the creationist had Sagan so flustered, that he (Sagan) began to shout “evolution is fact not a theory”. Well then. Where is the science in this, science fact by fiat? All the respect I had for Sagan drained instantly away at that moment and I knew that something was very wrong in the scientific community when my hero could not refute the creationist by using what I knew was real science, verifiable repeatable experimental data that supports your theory. (It turns out the creationist was right, but that’s another story for another venue.)

Fast forward to 2009 when I discovered the NPA (now the CNPS) by chance (well nothing happens by chance) and attended a video conference featuring Stoyan Sarg who was discussing his gravitational theory. By this time I had already determined that GR, SR, BB, QM, QED, and evolutionary theory were all either flawed or pseudoscience. While I did not agree with all of what I hear on that NPA video conference, I did agree that for the first time I was in a place where one could express scientific views that did not conform to the orthodox view and not be attacked and denigrated.

Since that time I have joined the NPA, attended over 50 video conferences, and made a reasoned choice to move my membership to the CNPS (as apparently most NPA members have done). This was important because the active body of the NPA, or now CNPS, is still about open dialog and debate about alternate viewpoints of how the physics of our universe works without fear of rejection. There are not many groups like that encourage the free exchange of ideas, yet as much as possible, leaving philosophical leaning at the door. While philosophical positions or ones world view is extremely important, it can exclude many ideas from being considered. And while ultimately not all ideas can be correct, that is, there can be only one truth, all ideas need to be considered as we do not yet completely understand the wonderful complexities of our created universe. I don’t know about you, but I want to know how it works!

While I was student teaching, which in the United States is the final phase before you are certified to teach in public schools, I was assigned to a class of Math II. Math II is a combination of Alegbra II and Geometry that all students must pass to graduate high school. Close to 20-25% of class time is spent drilling on how to solve various forms of the quadratic equation by hand. I have a problem with this--even the 3% of students that become engineers would never use this skill, because professional engineers would simply type such problems into a computer. Solving a quadratic equation by hand is no more useful than learning to compute the sine of 68° by hand or learning to use a slide rule.

If only the problems with mathematics education were limited to this one example… I have come to believe the problems with our society’s approach to math and science run far deeper than I myself would have been willing to believe as recently as 3 years ago.

Math is taught in an ideologically corrupt way. Math, as with all technology, is neutral. But the situations in which we employ language and tools are always biased, meaning we abstract them--we take them out of their concrete, neutral setting--in order to accomplish a specific purpose.

In the case of math classrooms, we are told that the purposes being pursued are scientific and technological advancement. Science is applied mathematics, and technology is applied science, so we are told. Growing up, I truly believed that by studying hard and applying myself in my math and science classes, I would eventually be in a position to advance the world's scientific knowledge or make technological innovations that would help transform society. I believed that science was the key that would open up new horizons of human culture. I knew from personal experience that science was correcting mistaken viewpoints held in religious communities. What would prevent it from transforming the rest of society as well?

A good friend from my high school was double majoring in math and physics at Auburn University and advised me to do the same--studying one without the other limits you to the pre-existing, narrowly-defined research areas, because you only have half of the theoretical big picture, where all the cutting-edge advancements are made.

Unfortunately, I have since learned that theoretical big picture is nothing but a jumbled mess. For all of their supernova-sized egos and bloated confidence, we scientists have never had a firm theory that explains why all of our physical models and our predictive algorithms are as accurate as they are.

My first inkling that the state of the our culture's theoretical knowledge was amiss came in high school when I found I had forgotten everything about a topic I had aced the test for just a year ago. Maybe our drill, test, drill, test educational system was not the best way to really master a subject after all. In college, I was attending a Sunday School class taught by the head of the religion department through a local church that met on campus, and one Sunday we read a passage from Anthony De Mello. Soon after, I ordered De Mello's most focus book online, titled Awareness. One Amazon review assured me "This book will change your life." I was reading it in my dorm's break room and told one of my hall mates, Andrew, to read a passage. We became hooked and even started a philosophy/meditation blog. At any rate, one of De Mello's chapters contained the following passage:

"I've got a lovely quote here... from A. S. Neill’’s book Summerhill… He developed a kind of maverick school. He took in boys and girls and just let them be free. You want to learn to read and write, fine; you don't want to learn to read and write, fine. You can do anything you want with your life, provided you don't interfere with the freedom of someone else. Don't interfere with someone else's freedom; otherwise you're free. He says that the worst ones came to him from convent school… "They'd be rebelling for six months, fighting the system. The worst was a girl who would take a bicycle and ride into town, avoiding class, avoiding school, avoiding everything. But once they got over their rebellion, everybody wanted to learn; they even began protesting, “Why don't we have class today?” But they would only take what they were interested in. They'd be transformed. In the beginning parents were frightened to send their children to this school; they said, “How can you educate them if you don't discipline them? ... Listen to what he said -- extraordinary words, holy words. “Every child has a god in him. Our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil. Children come to my school, little devils, hating the world, destructive, unmannerly, lying, thieving, bad tempered. In six months they are happy, healthy children who do no evil.” These are amazing words coming from a man whose school in Britain is regularly inspected by people from theMinistry of Education, by any headmaster or headmistress or anyone who would care to go there. Amazing. It was his charisma.

"You don't do this kind of thing from a blueprint; you've got to be a special kind of person. In some of his lectures to headmasters and headmistresses he says… “Come to Summerhill and you'll never find a handicapped child with a nickname (you know how cruel kids can be when someone stammers). You'll never find anyone needling a stammerer, never. There's no violence in those children, because no one is practicing violence on them, that's why.”” Listen to these words of revelation, sacred words.

"We have people in the world like this. No matter what scholars and priests and theologians tell you, there are and have been people who have no quarrels, no jealousies, no conflicts, no wars, no enmities, none! They exist in my country, or, sad to say, they existed until relatively recently. I've had Jesuit friends go out to live and work among people who, they assured me, were incapable of stealing or lying. One Sister said to me that when she went to the northeast of India to work among some tribes there, the people would lock up nothing. Nothing was ever stolen and they never told lies until the Indian government and missionaries showed up."Every child has a god in him; our attempts to mold the child will turn the god into a devil."

When typing this just now, I see that Neill and De Mello echo the philosophy of William Blake, who interestingly, and I now think correctly, critiqued the limits of Newtonian science, claiming, before the word ‘energy’ had even been formulated as a scientific concept (it was more of a theological concept at that time), that energy is the necessary contrary to reason. The purpose of reason is to channel our energetic inner genius. Reason cannot stand on its own. Our cultures’ (Blake’s and our own) faith in reason is not itself rational.

At any rate, I ordered Neill’s book Summerhill next, and became even more hooked in alternative education. Our education system does not lead to mastery of any topic. It does the opposite. It encourages a narrowly-focused, tunnel-vision approach to knowledge, whereas innovation requires a broad understanding that situates knowledge within a specific, historical context. To master a subject you have been schooled in, you actually must first unlearn your schooling so that you will be able to see the connections to other fields that our schooling conditions us to disregard as off-topic and irrelevant.

Despite my critical attitude towards our educational institutions, I continued to take for granted the automatic effectiveness of science. Our education system may be broken, but our society's belief in Science still guaranteed progress in my mind.

As it turns out, "in our minds"--not in actuality--is the primary place that 20th-century theoretical science has progressed!

In May of 2013, when researching the best way to tutor calculus, I googled " ‘variable acceleration’ Newton Leibniz " and soon found this essay by Miles Mathis, which explains “time is just a second, comparative, measurement of distance”--NOT the mystical “fourth dimension”, as I was told as a physics student in college. The more I read about the history of science, the more obvious it became to me that the entire framework of science education is off kilter. The scientific community had enough sustained momentum to survive this issue up until the disaster of WWI. WWI was the anvil on the camel’s back that destroyed whatever faith in humanity that our institutional leaders had left, and enabled poorly executed experiments to be seen as good enough evidence that a new theoretical "paradigm shift" has occurred.

The truth is that paradigm shifts occur when a new tool becomes widely available, so that interested parties can make measurements that were not possible before--NOT because a genius generates a stunning new worldview, which sadly is still the way scientific advances are presented. Advances in telescopes, more so than the individual genius of Copernicus, led to the heliocentric solar system. Advances in mechanical timekeeping, more so than the individual genius of Newton) led to the theory of gravity. Advances in microscopes, more so than the individual genius of Darwin, led to evolutionary theory. There is genius in EVERY person--both tool-maker and tool-user. New technological tools allow that genius to be expressed in conceptually exciting ways, but we should give just as much credit to the developers of the tools as we do to the conceptual theorists. The primary source of innovation is experimental tinkering with what we can see. It makes sense that periods of rapid innovation occur in periods following the development of tools that allow us to expand our vision into the very small scale and very large scale.

Clifford Conner makes the same point more eloquently:

“Another ideological corollary of the intellectuals’ contempt for manual labor is the ‘remarkably widespread wrong idea’ that science is rigidly distinct from and supersedes technology in historical importance. Our twenty-first-century perspective prompts us to think of technology as ‘applied science’, a notion based on a the facile assumption that scientific theory has always been a precondition of technological advance. Historically the opposite has most often been true: Although technology and science have always been closely associated endeavors, it is technology that has driven the growth of scientific knowledge… As technologies develop and become more sophisticated, the scientific knowledge generated at earlier stages is continuously incorporate into subsequent practice, and in that sense technology can indeed be said to exhibit the character of ‘applied science’. The relation is one of cumulative mutual reinforcement with the initial impulses coming from the technology side... the process of gaining knowledge of nature has generally been more a product of hands than brains; that is, of empirical trial-and-error procedures rather than theoretical application.” - A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks, pp. 13,14

I am a dissident scientist because mainstream science no longer deserves the name. I still believe that we can re-establish a functional scientific community. But we must do away with the pipe dream that science progresses automatically, within our money-driven universities and grant-seeking research institutions.

I have been a member of CNPS/NPA for 8 years. I have submitted papers; I have listened to talks on Saturday and at the conferences; I have read other peoples paper and books; and all this helps me understand much more about science, physics and gravity. My son David got me started and since then I can't stop. This has made science interesting and fun. You will not regret joining this group.

There is conferences organized by Icarus, Tau Zero, 100 Year Starship and STAIF II but this is the only place allowing against the mainstream ideas. Einstein was wrong in many aspects so it doesn't make sense to try to achieve faster-than-light travelling without first accepting Einstein was wrong.

I joined the NPA about five years ago when my interest in "dissident" physics was piqued by finding the website of the late Dr. Paul Marmet. I attended the 2011 and 2013 NPA conference in Maryland, presenting my first paper in 2013. I was disheartened by the turmoil that beset the NPA shortly afterward and the denigration of two of its most valuable movers and shakers, Dave de Hilster and Greg Volk. Naturally I supported them throughout and readily joined the new John Chappell NPS that David formed to continue to fine work of the old NPA.

Having missed a conference in 2014, I was very glad to attend this year's 1st Annual JCNPS conference in Florida. Although the attendance was much less than the previous NPA conferences (held jointly with the Electric Universe gang), the ability to interact on such a personal level with fellow dissidents, including dinner and Dave's home, made this conference a special one. The smaller audience enabled very lively discussions during the talks as well as afterward during the dinners. I look forward to the future conferences with more attendees and the continued work of the new JCNPS. And to renew friendships with the attendees I met and hopefully new ones as the old NPA'ers return to the fold.

Having returned to Vancouver from the CNPS conference with my mind spinning with the ideas presented by the participants and the exchanges that occurred during the presentations and during our lunches and dinners, I have now had a chance to collect my thoughts and ask myself whether the conference was a success. My answer is that it was highly successful. The participants opened up lines of thought that were stimulated by debating and exploring, and doing so in an atmosphere of courtesy and intense search for the understanding of concepts and the truth that underlies the phenomena produced by nature.

Do I think that CNPS conferences should continue? Yes, absolutely. I believe they will grow in size and recapture the magic of the NPA conferences held prior to the management crisis that led to the incorporation of the CNPA. We are back on the right track and it is heartening to see it happen.

I found the recent August ‘CNPS-1’ Boca Raton a wonderful experience and very special in many ways. The attending participants were stimulating, creative, courteous, wise and knowledgeable (but not conceited) – and were an outstanding and diverse group. Wish I could have stayed to the very end. The immense work and pre-planning helped it roll off efficiently. That was evident from the beautiful Proceedings Book, nametag badges, and etc., presented to each attendee in the hallway even before entering for the first session – and from the many other nice things to follow.

Although there are dozens of good science conferences in the U.S. each year – yet I think the Boca Raton conference will stand out among the top and most fondly remembered. The group was not too big to interact nicely and efficiently during, between, and after sessions. There was very ample time to ‘present’ without trying to rush to beat strict deadlines, and ample time for questions, comments, and even some discussion after each presentation.

A great variety of accepted ‘dogma’ not normally challenged in ‘mainstream’ physics and cosmology – was challenged; and plausible alternatives were discussed. In fact, I was surprised by the diversity of existing dogma challenged, and the different backgrounds of the challengers. But as Thomas Paine once remarked, “The long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it the appearance of looking right.” And other presenters also attempted to explain how existing realities, even generally agreed upon, could be better approached and presented -- so they could be grasp, appreciated and accepted still more widely.

I hope to email some presenters some additional thoughts and comments on their presentation when time allows. (A very stimulating, educational, and fun conference indeed.)

The conference on August 5 through August 9 at the Florida Atlantic University highlighted the unique and significant contribution of the Chappell Natural Philosophy Society to the world of science. It is about the only venue available for serious amateur scientists to contribute to scientific knowledge and advancement.

The quality and creativity shown in the reports presented at the conference speak for themselves. These are voices that the scientific establishment needs to hear. Amateur clearly does not mean uninformed or inarticulate. What we in CNPs have to offer is well informed and cogent thoughts that originate from a diversity of professional backgrounds which the establishment, unfortunately, chooses to exclude from their in-house forums for new ideas. As a result, they appear to be unaware that the only ideas one can hope to learn from are the ones with which they don't already agree. And just about all one can get from those who have been indoctrinated into the same literature and methodologies as themselves is what they all already agree on.

Coming from industry and business, I am well familiar with multi-disciplinary teams. Such teams are deliberately populated by members from very different backgrounds and disciplines. It is that very diversity which allows such teams to come up with solutions to otherwise intractable problems which no single discipline would ever think of. By listening only to their in-house forums, the establishment's method of seeking new ideas is akin to forming a multidisciplinary team with only one member. More members may be at the table, but they all have been conditioned to think alike and have the same fundamental beliefs that guide their thought process down the same channels.

The lack of meaningful progress in developing and integrating scientific theory over the past couple of decades strongly indicates the need for some fresh ideas in scientific circles. But about the only place fresh ideas can come from is groups like the Chappell Natural Philosophy Society. Chappell appears to be unique in its combination of successful people from diverse professional backgrounds with keen minds, who are willing to study scientific theory with commitment and discipline but who all think down different channels of their own devising. By bringing us together in open forums with free discussion, we can learn from and encourage each other to create even better new ideas than we would in isolation, But we need to make enough waves to force the sleeping establishment to wake up and notice that we have something worth while to offer them.

I guess, David, that is where your thoughts on communication, sharing, speaking out and openly spreading ideas comes in.

regards, Dick Calkins

Opportunity to Share Thoughts

September 7, 2015

An anonymous letter urged me to attend the 2014 NPA Conference in Maryland. and share my thoughts on the theory of special relativity, gravity and inertia. I am glad to have been present at the University of Maryland.

The 1st JCNPS recently held at Boca Raton, Florida, was an eye-opener. The attendance was small but the discussions were lively and satisfying with plenty of time for one-to-one interactions.

I have every reason to hope that the second JPNPS Conference coming up from 20 - 23rd August 2016 will be bigger and livelier. I am looking forward to be part of it.

Finally my thanks to all the people who had worked so hard to keep the John Chappell spirit alive.